Trinity Notes. A message from the Pastor. An intentional Christian community of reconciliation transformation and love.

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1 Trinity Notes 2017 A newsletter of Trinity Episcopal Church An intentional Christian community of reconciliation transformation and love. A message from the Pastor Baptismal Font and Altar Consecration The Bishop s visit on December 3rd affords us the opportunity to consecrate our new outdoor altar and baptismal Font. Since the font, given in memory of David Acevedo is mobile we will bring it into the sanctuary and have the bishop dedicate it prior to its use for the first time. The Altar which was given in memory of Al Anderson will be consecrated for use immediately after the end of our service in the sanctuary. Choir Trinity Episcopal Church PLACE STAMP HERE 1118 Preston Avenue Charlottesville, VA We have two special services coming up. They are an opportunities for you to join the choir on a one time basis or just check things out. On December 3rd Bishop Shannon will be with us and the following (Continued on page 2) Trinity Episcopal Church Preston Avenue, Charlottesville, Virginia trinepch@ntelos.net Website: trinityepiscopalcville.org 1 Tel:

2 (Continued from page 1) Sunday, December 10, will be our celebration of Lessons and Carols. If you have any questions please speak with Colleen Fennessy our Minister of Music. Gun Control Article After our discussion during the Community Reflection time last week an opinion piece from the New York Times was pass on to me. I have included the article Why Christians Should Support Gun Control by Richard Parke in this edition of the Trinity NOTES to continue the discussion. It can be found on pages 4 and 5. The screening will take place Friday, December 1, 7:00 p.m. at Sojourners United Church of Christ 1017 Elliott Ave, Charlottesville, VA Pledge Update After last Sunday s ingathering we have a little more than half the number of pledges we are hoping for. Please, please turn in your pledge card. Mitchell House Update Mitchell House, the two apartment house that we use for homeless women and their families, has recently suffered some significant flood damaged to the basement apartment. Most of the repairs will be covered by insurance but there are some pre existing conditions such as the presence of asbestos that Trinity will have to cover the cost of remediation. We estimate that these costs will be about $5,000. Any help you can provide will be greatly appreciated. Justice on Trial Series Play There are tickets available for the play we learned about during the announcement time last Sunday. The play is entitled Justice on Trial The Play Black Lives Matter Too. The play will be on Friday, December 8th at the MLK Performing Arts Center. Ticket are $45. The repairs also mean that some of the furniture that is there well need to be stored at the church for about two weeks. It doesn t make for an appealing parish hall but please be understanding as we are moving as quickly as possible to put the apartment back in working order. In Christ, Pastor Cass 2 11

3 Advent Wreath Frames Needed! It s that time of year again, time for the kids and youth to assemble Advent wreathes for the coming season! If you have a wreath from last year, PLEASE BRING IT ON SUNDAY! The frames can be reused and spiffed up! Please bring them to the Parish Hall by 9am on Sunday! Thanks! Consider signing up to donate altar flowers in December! Please sign up in the foyer and Maria will contact you with the details! Don t forget to make your monthly pledge donation. Visit the Give page on the Trinity Website to make your donation online! The altar flowers this week are given by Vivian and Fred Schmidt in memory of their parents. 10 3

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5 A man visited a memorial of crosses in Sutherland Springs, Tex., last week. Credit Todd Heisler/The New York Times Why Christians Must Support Gun Control By RICHARD PARKE SUTHERLAND SPRINGS, Tex. Here in rural Texas, the hay, baled and rolled, waits for winter. The corn is shorn and the stiff yucca stands guard in the dusk. I know this country; it is a short drive from my home, past places like the Devil s Backbone and Purgatory to skinny Cibolo Creek, choked by mesquite and live oak. In Sutherland Springs, a family of five trudges in front of me in the headlights, past the police cordon, shuffling, heads down, apparently headed home. They call it God s country, partly for its beauty, partly because it sometimes feels like God is the only thing out here. As in many small Texas towns, the center of Sutherland Springs is the church. And if anything stands out about the worst mass murder in the history of Texas, which took place here last Sunday, killing 26 and wounding at least 20, it is this: a simple, white wooden sanctuary with the peaked roof, next to an unkempt field by a lonesome two-lane road. Now they are going to tear it down, bulldozing it from the South Texas plain, as if doing so could remove the sacrilege of killing defenseless people during a Sunday sermon. This is what America s response to mass homicide has come to. We don t remove the killing machines that have put tens of thousands of Americans in their graves or hospital beds in this century, but we do demolish the First Baptist Church that has stood at this lonely crossroad for nearly a century. It is this doomed site, rooted in the black soil, that cries out for people of faith to act. 8 5 The killer, Devin Patrick Kelley, used his Ruger AR -556, with round magazines, to shoot nearly 50 helpless, trapped people. The weapon is a variant of the AR-15, itself barely distinguishable from the M-16, the American military s standard-issue infantry weapon. These, along with handguns, are the weapons of choice for today s mass killers. I won t pretend to be more religious than the next person, nor am I afraid to call myself a Christian. Like a lot of Americans, I have a complicated relationship with my faith. But that shouldn t lessen our sense of moral obligation in the face of what some blithely call the new normal. Nor should we fall for the siren call of more guns, the unproven good-guywith-a-gun myth, something many of my fellow Texans have indulged in over the past few days. Instead, we have a duty to confront these machines and the profiteering behind them. It is easy to feel numb, powerless and hopeless. For the dead, one can only grimace at that last moment of fear. For the survivors and their beloved, a harsh sentence awaits. First, there is the trauma, like an amputation, something C. S. Lewis wrote about after the death of his wife, Joy Davidman, in No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid, Lewis, a member of the Anglican Church, wrote in the slender and tortured memoir A Grief Observed. The same fluttering in the stomach, the (Continued on page 6)

6 (Continued from page 5) same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing. When traumatic death strikes, the most common question is, Why? The second most common question is invariably, Where was God? But the last and most troubling of all is, What does God want? It is the same cry that Jesus let out from the cross as darkness spread across the land: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? I won t pretend to know the mind of God, so all I can offer is a simple guess at what he would say: Stop the killing. Of course killing will never end, completely; we are imperfect creatures of free will, prone to sin the absence of good as well as beauty. But that is categorically different from allowing the proliferation of machines solely designed to kill large numbers of people quickly, machines that bear no more semblance to a rifle than a nuclear weapon does to a firework. And the sin of omission doing nothing is nearly as bad as the murder itself. In recent years, time after time, the AR-15 or one of its close cousins has played the starring role in an American mass shooting. In Las Vegas it shared a macabre double-billing with the semiautomatic version of the Russian AK-47. Chattanooga. Orlando. San Bernardino. Aurora. These two and the like are nearly always there. And there is a reason. Because of the weapons quasi-military design, even an unskilled hand can pull the trigger 40 times in a minute. A typical hunting rifle will hold several rounds. A typical AR-15 magazine holds 30. There are at least five million AR- -type weapons in this nation alone. Sturm, Ruger & Company, the Connecticut company that made the weapon used here, reported $664 million in net sales last year. Here in Texas, the politicians have come and gone, visiting Sutherland Springs on a raw, rainy Wednesday night, making empty calls for prayers and excuses for inaction, as when Vice President Mike Pence awkwardly intoned, Words fail when saints and heroes fall. Indeed, they do. The words, bereft of real meaning, just blow away into the cold north wind. He appears to forget his purportedly deep religiosity. 6 Christianity demands action. It insists on the protection of the innocent. In the 13th century, St. Thomas Aquinas justified war in self-defense, but he also opposed the killing of innocent civilians. Aquinas holds that causing the death of innocents in a foreseeable manner, whether intentionally or indirectly, according to the Cambridge divinity scholar Daniel H. Weiss, is never justified. And yet Christian evangelicals, particularly white Southern Baptists, have generally parted ways with Catholics on gun laws. Some are simply politically opposed to gun control because they are Republicans; others understandably distrust a society that does not seem to embrace God. But that opposition is crumbling. While six in 10 evangelical leaders report living in a household with a gun, nearly as many, 55 percent, favor stricter gun laws, according to an August survey by the National Association of Evangelicals. They accept the Second Amendment, said Leith Anderson, president of the National Association of Evangelicals when the survey results were released. But they also deeply grieve when weapons are used to take innocent lives. The same is true in Texas. Though some 37.5 percent of Texans own guns, according to an estimate by the Pew Research Center, tiny fissures have opened up in the state s conservative political culture since the massacre here. Jason Villalba of Dallas, a prominent Republican state legislator, has called on the state s political leadership to appoint a bipartisan commission to focus on all possible causes of gun violence in Texas. At first, this might sound like a political dodge, but Mr. Villalba wants new gun restrictions on the table: There needs to be common-sense gun control reform in Texas. The Dallas Morning News, the state s largest newspaper, quickly endorsed the plan: Our goals ought to be simple. The most deadly kind of weapons should be harder to get. All the people of the Abrahamic faiths share the same duty to protect the innocent. The Jewish bystander is to rescue a person in peril. Islam requires the protection of all innocent lives. I fear that if we fail in this, bulldoze our churches and let the machines of war and profit win over faith, then God will never forgive us. For that would be the worst sin of all. Health and Healing in Virginia I will bring health and healing to it (Judah); I will heal my people and will let them enjoy abundant peace and security. (Jeremiah 33:6) Do not withhold good from those to whom it is due, when it is in your power to act. Do not say to your neighbor, "Come back tomorrow and I ll give it to you" when you already have it with you. (Proverbs 3:27-28) Caring for the sick and the disadvantaged is an important ministry for faith communities, which is why faith communities started so many hospitals in the Commonwealth and most low-income health clinics today are staffed and funded by faith communities. Having access to quality, affordable health care saves lives, addresses health problems in the early stages, prevents family bankruptcies and improves families quality of life. Virginia is one of 19 states that has not expanded Medicaid eligibility, as authorized under the Affordable Care Act. As a result, 300,000 low-income Virginians are being denied access to essential health care services. The most important thing Virginia could do to expand healthcare and help low-income working families is to tap federal Medicaid dollars. Virginia s faith leaders call upon the General Assembly to expand healthcare access in Virginia by drawing down federal Medicaid dollars. During the recent elections, Virginians told pollsters that access to quality healthcare was their top concern. Expanding healthcare to low-income Virginians would be an important step in this direction. It would: Provide quality, affordable healthcare to 300,000 additional Virginians. Strengthen the financial position of hospitals and clinics by covering currently uncompensated care for a major segment of the uninsured. Add more than 13,000 healthcare jobs in Virginia. Bring in $1.5 billion per year in federal revenue for the Commonwealth. Page two Now is the time to help your neighbors by encouraging your state senator and delegate to vote in favor of expanding healthcare access in Virginia. But, act NOW. It will be much more difficult to reach lawmakers once the Virginia General Assembly convenes on January 10, Here are couple of steps you can take: Meet in-person with your delegate and senator. Share your concerns about the lack of health coverage options for your low- and moderate-income neighbors. VICPP staff will be happy to brief you via phone before the meeting. Write letters to your delegate and senator. Letters that personalize the plight of low-income individuals and families really matter. Write to them at their district offices (before January) or Richmond offices (January or February). For information about who your elected leaders and the issues visit: you can put in your address and get the information for the senator and delegate representing your area. you can get information about your legislators. get more information about healthcare access and sign up for VICPP action alerts. Virginia Interfaith Center for Public Policy (VICPP), 1716 E Franklin Street, Richmond, VA (804)